Not much happens in What Just Happened, a film about egos — and ego deflation — in which the harried protagonist utters the bulk of his dialogue into a cell phone.

But somehow, it adds up to the sharpest Hollywood satire since The Player.

Our hero's name is Ben. He's just been named one of Vanity Fair's 30 most powerful film producers. He has three kids, two ex-wives and a Bluetooth headset affixed to his ear. If he weren't so heinously rich, you'd feel sorry for him; his days meander through dyspeptic and inconclusive squabbles with agents, studio heads, assistants, writers and a petulant, power-crazed A-list star who refuses to shave off a beard the size of a groundhog. That would be Bruce Willis. And it just about eats his face.

There we have the merriment of What Just Happened, which marks a return to form for both Barry Levinson and Robert De Niro — in their first collaboration since Analyze That (which Levinson produced) and their best since Wag the Dog (which he directed). What makes What JustHappened such a wicked-fine satire of the film industry is hard to pinpoint until you realize that probably half the shots are close-ups of De Niro's shining puss. I don't know quite how to explain it, but he twinkles. He's had this phosphorescent quality for years, using it in comedies and lighter character bits that offset the more menacing Method roles on his résumé.

But as Ben, De Niro cuts his twinkle with a hint of distracted melancholy. For once, he isn't the guy everyone's afraid of. He's the one trying to placate the guy everyone's afraid of: Willis, whose virtuosic turn as a fit-throwing Hollywood bully rivals Tom Cruise's in Tropic Thunder. (True, Bruce doesn't dance in a fat suit. But he does get to trash a costume shop.)

This Willis fellow is one of Ben's major headaches. The other is Fiercely, an edgy Sean Penn vehicle that bombs its first test screening. Ninety-one percent of audience respondents hate, no, loathe, no, despise the ending, in which villains kill the hero and his little dog, too. Jeremy, the film's tetchy British auteur, goes ballistic when Ben and studio chief Lou (Catherine Keener) tell him to change the climax so that Fido lives. Or else. "You're asking me to eviscerate the film," he howls, "so that you can lose a little less money!" Well, yeah.

Jeremy is played by the rumble-voiced Canadian actor Michael Wincott (Seraphim Falls), looking like Sid Vicious and sounding like the Dark Knight after an ugly London pub crawl. Watching him feels like rubber-necking at a car crash, and I mean that in the best way. Here and elsewhere, What Just Happened manages to ridicule the inner workings of the film industry without veering into burlesque — it's just idiotic enough to be believable. When a screenwriter played by Stanley Tucci pitches a thriller about a florist, he calls it "the Rose Bowl parade meets The Da Vinci Code," and I expect to find it in theaters next year.

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That ring of truth we hear — actually, it's the hollow clang of tinpot filmmakers jockeying for power — comes from Art Linson's screenplay, adapted from his own 2002 memoir of a lengthy producing career that spans Car Wash and Fight Club. Not to mention What Just Happened. But Levinson's film has a cinematic zip all its own, an energy harnessed from crack performances and bouncing edits (bravo, Hank Corwin) twinned with well-chosen pop songs and a canny score (bravo, Marcelo Zarvos).

As we ride shotgun in Ben's Porsche, eavesdropping on his phone calls, we witness the serial humiliations of life in a town where you're only as big as last weekend's box office. Listen to Willis. "You're just the producer," he says. "You're just the (bleeping) mayonnaise in a bad sandwich." That might be true of Ben. But De Niro keeps it fresh.